Breaking the (Benford) Law

@article{TamCho2007BreakingT,
  title={Breaking the (Benford) Law},
  author={Wendy K. Tam Cho and Brian J. Gaines},
  journal={The American Statistician},
  year={2007},
  volume={61},
  pages={218 - 223}
}
Benford's law is seeing increasing use as a diagnostic tool for isolating pockets of large datasets with irregularities that deserve closer inspection. Popular and academic accounts of campaign finance are rife with tales of corruption, but the complete dataset of transactions for federal campaigns is enormous. Performing a systematic sweep is extremely arduous; hence, these data are a natural candidate for initial screening by comparison to Benford's distributions. 
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124 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
8
Background Citations
32
Methods Citations
21
Results Citations
1

124 Citations

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References

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TLDR
The purpose of this paper is to assist auditors in the most effective use of digital analysis based on Benford’s law, which is based on a peculiar observation that certain digits appear more frequently than others in data sets.
Detecting Problems in Survey Data Using Benford’s Law
TLDR
It is demonstrated how Benford’s law, the distribution that first digits of numbers in certain data sets should follow, can be used to test for data abnormalities.
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TLDR
If distributions are selected at random (in any "unbi- ased" way) and random samples are then taken from each of these dis- tributions, the significant digits of the combined sample will converge to the logarithmic (Benford) distribution.
THE FIRST-DIGIT PHENOMENON
A century-old observation concerning an unexpected pattern in the first digits of many tables of numerical data has recently been discovered to also hold for the stock market, census statistics, and…
On the Peculiar Distribution of the U.S. Stock Indexes' Digits
Abstract Recent research has focused on studying the patterns in the digits of closely followed stock market indexes. In this paper we find that the series of 1-day returns on the Dow-Jones…
Election Forensics: The Second-digit Benford's Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections
Election Forensics: The Second-digit Benford’s Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections While the technology to conduct elections continues to be imperfect, it is useful to investigate…
An Empirical Non-Parametric Likelihood Family of Data-Based Benford-Like Distributions
A mathematical expression known as Benford's law provides an example of an unexpected relationship among randomly selected sequences of first significant digits (FSDs). Newcomb [Note on the frequency…
The First Digit Phenomenon
If asked whether certain digits in numbers collected randomly from, for example, the front pages of newspapers or from stock-market prices should occur more often than others, most people would think…
Use of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Cramer-Von Mises and Related Statistics without Extensive Tables
SUMMARY This paper gives modifications of eleven statistics, usually used for goodness of fit, so as to dispense with the usual tables of percentage points. Some test situations are illustrated, and…
Assessing the Accuracy of Self-Reported Data: an Evaluation of the Toxics Release Inventory
Self-reported regulatory data are hard to verify. This article compares air emissions reported by plants in the Toxics Release Inventory with chemical concentration levels measured by EPA pollution…
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